i did i tried
by AlexandraLeaving
Summary: Someone has to retrieve him. And they were both misfits, after all. Gen, but will be slash in Part IV. Please do not be put off by lack of capitalisation in the title it is a conscious choice, rather than netspeak.


**i did i tried**  
a post-mexico story

_Warning:_ although this part is not slashy, the story will be a slash one in the end. There is also some bad language and profanity, including language which could be read as homophobic. This is _in no way_ reflective of my own views. There is a female OC in this. She is a six-foot-tall lesbian and she and Sands will not be having a relationship. She's only there because I think it's fun to explore his character from the POV of an 'outsider' (as we, the viewers, are outsiders).

_Thanks to: _Kerttu, for a very kind review of my other OUaTiM story, Wonderfully Made, and Miss Becky, for pointing out the POV shift when I posted this on livejournal!

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**Part I**

_mother the wardrobe is full of infantrymen  
i did i asked them  
but they snarled saying it was a mans life  
'Mother the Wardrobe is Full of Infantrymen', by Roger McGough

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_

This is not how she'd wanted to spend Thanksgiving. The plane is nearly empty – _because who flies to Mexico at 4 a.m. on Thanksgiving, for Christ's sake?_ – and the airhostesses are not their usual lipglossy selves, because like her they'd drawn the short straw.

It's not like _he's_ gonna thank her. She gulps sour orange juice from a round plastic carton and wonders if they chose her for that very reason, just because it would stick in his craw. She wouldn't be at all surprised. They never surprised her, these days. (And it was true that part of her was maybe kinda happy that he'd screwed everything up so royally and that she was the one who got to gloat.)

Christ, he'd been such a cocky little shit when she'd first met him at Langley – that would be, what? Seven years ago. So, okay it was never really on the cards that _Sheldon_ (he always said his name softly, emphasising the first syllable, like it was just too sexy to be true, even though in anyone else it would have been the final, damning, shameful mark of inescapable geekhood), that pretty little bitch who was so good a shot you had to wonder if he'd sold his soul for it, was going to be the best of friends with Anna Latheram, quintessential power-dyke of the 90's, approaching six foot and not about to start twisting her hair around her finger just because someone decided to switch on the desperate-dark-eyes crap. That didn't explain why it had ended up being them who were the biggest rivals in their class, though: they were always within a couple percentage points of each other on the tests, they ran neck and neck on the obstacle course (and it wasn't even a contest for first place, there, unlike in the classroom: he was hardly the biggest guy there and verging on skinny, and she, much as she might pretend otherwise, was a woman with less upper body strength than the guys, so neither of them would ever win), they struggled to outshoot each other. He usually won at that and it made her want to rip his nuts off.

She tips her seat back as far as it will go and fiddles with her headphones, trying to get them settled in a way that won't dig into her head. There's never any decent music on flights like this.

There had been that one time, when she'd wondered. Because if truth be told, both of them were misfits: it was more obvious with him, sure (because only in Hollywood are the agents that pretty, or that rich – yeah, he didn't talk about it, but everyone knew – or that crazy. She still can't imagine how he'd navigated the psych evaluation). But with her – not so much. Apart from the height she must seem pretty normal to the casual observer: she's in good shape, but her build is only average, she wears her light brown hair in a short, blunt cut. If she'd been five inches shorter and had a boyfriend on her arm she'd have passed unnoticed, but for those unusually good scores on the range (because while female agents are hardly curios in this day and age, it's less common to see them outshooting 270 pound guys). But the CIA is still a fundamentally conservative organisation. Had anyone asked, she'd have said she'd had to learn that the hard way, with little looks and little comments that wore her down a little bit more every time there was a break between class and running the course, while he'd surfed through training on some crazy sea of rabid lust, like a fawn on LSD – well, yeah, mostly that's what she would've said, but sometimes she thought maybe he hadn't had such a good time.

Sometimes at Langley she used to wake up with a jolt in the middle of the night, as all those workouts and all that adrenaline finally caught up with you. Then she'd go back down to the range and practise getting those bullets signed, sealed and delivered that little bit quicker. She had to do that, if she wanted a chance at beating New Agent Sheldon Sands the following day. Except, one night he was already there.

_To Be Continued.

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Feedback will be appreciated, so, so much._


End file.
